BALANCING ACT
It’s a common complaint – you’ve been on the road for hours and your back is playing up again, or you want lunch but the only option is fast food, or for the fourth time that morning you get cut off by another car driver in a rush. The endless stresses and strains from being behind the wheel can build to become a daily burden of physical and mental stress exacerbated by tight time pressures, a lack of facilities and abuse from the general public.
At Monash University’s Driving Health project, research has been undertaken to build a picture of the health and working life of truckies in Australia to understand the pressures they face, with the final aim of developing programs to improve driver health. Part of this research involved an online survey of 1,390 Australian truck drivers to generate a snapshot of their physical and mental health.
Driving Health is a three-year project that started off analysing workers’ compensation data to look at the overall health of transport workers. It was found that truck drivers are at much higher risk of being injured
